Today, food processing plant owners around the world are striving to improve the performance of their equipment. One reason for this is that the price for food has increased significantly in several areas, making it more important to reduce the product loss. Another reason is that the demands for environmental friendly food processing are higher making it more important to, for instance, reduce the usage of water.
Product losses and water consumption for a food processing system are generally high in connection to or during cleaning of the system and changing from one product to another. The reason for this is that when the processing of the product is stopped the system will still contain remaining product. In order to capture the remaining product it is a common approach to flush the system with clean water. A mix phase, that is, a mix of the remaining product and the clean water, is then fed through a product recovery system in order to capture product residues and feeding them back into the system. When the product concentration is below a certain threshold the process of recovering product residues is stopped and the cleaning process is started, which most often comprise adding different cleaning agents in order to make sure that all kind of residues are removed.
As can be readily understood, in order to reduce product losses and the usage of water the mix phase should be as distinct as possible. In other words, the mix phase, i.e. transition from only product, also referred to as product phase, to only clean water, also referred to as water phase, should be as short as possible. Different technologies for achieving this have been developed. One example is the so-called “ice pigging” technology in which an ice and water mixture is added in order to make a distinct differentiator between the product phase and the water phase. Another example is to add a rubber object in order to keep the product phase and the water phase apart.
Further, in some cases, a product phase is followed by another product phase. In such cases it is also important to keep the mix phase, in this situation comprising a mix of the first product and the second product, short in order to be able to reduce the product loss.
Even though there are technologies for keeping two phases apart, there is a need to optimize the process further in order to be able to reduce water usage and product losses.